Israel is a failed state that should be dismantled

While many readers may find our view of the Israel-Palestine situation blasphemous, we defy anyone to propose another solution for this 50-year-old conflict.

We hope all can agree that another 20, 50 or 100 years of this war is unacceptable, not least because of the prospects for genocide and regional or global nuclear war.

Short of that, this conflict is not good for Israel or Palestine. A third force must step in and stop it or it will go on forever. We cannot allow the arms industry's political influence to permanently institutionalize the meat grinder called the Middle East conflict.

On one hand, the establishment of the state of Israel was a noble experiment that has not turned out the way anyone expected. On the other, Israel is founded on widespread anti-Semitism, not just the Holocaust.

Few of the Allied countries wanted to take in Jews escaping Hitler during World War II. So afterward the United Nations put Jews in someone else's country, the land of Palestine.

In short, the anti-Semitism of the U.S. and others created an untenable state of Israel, while expressing sanctimonious posturing of righteousness. In reality, Israel was set up to fail. It is a cruel hoax on Jews, who suffer collective PTSD.

The last 50 years have proven that this experiment in creating a new country is a failure and that we need to go back to the drawing board. The solution is for Jews in the U.S. to demand an end to U.S. economic and military support for an ever-expanding Israel. If that doesn't happen, the future may well "blame the Jews" all over again.

Ronda Cooperstein, Pikesville
Richard J. Ochs, Baltimore
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It was not a surprise to see “’Iron Dome’ worth the aid” [The Baltimore Sun, July 13, 2014]. However, Robert Pines, as far as I can tell, has no expertise in the matter of Iron Dome. And further, he tries mistakenly to justify the goodness of U.S. foreign aid by promoting military assistance to Israel.

The Baltimore Sun should have published instead “Iron Dome: the Public Relations Weapon” by John Mecklin, published July 10, 2014 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Iron Dome is a weapons system coming out of the long-discredited concept of missile defense. The Pentagon spent billions of tax dollars on missile defense only to realize its total failure.

Mecklin rightfully highlighted a July 9, 2014 NPR interview with Ted Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a missile defense expert: "It—my guess is maybe [it hits a targeted missile] 5 percent of the time—could be even lower. ... “and “. . . the Iron Dome has no chance, for all practical purposes, of destroying the artillery rocket."

The Hamas rockets are primitive, relatively small and quite inaccurate. But the Israeli propaganda machine wants to demonize Hamas as a highly sophisticated terrorist organization. One way of doing that is to claim the miraculous Iron Dome has saved the people from these savage attacks. The other side of the coin is to take attention away from the massive number of civilians killed and wounded by the Israeli military.

What Israel is doing to the Palestinian civilians is a massive war crime. Any acts of terror by Hamas must be condemned but pale compared to the might of the occupying force. Our government must cut off all aid to Israel due to its abysmal human rights record.
Peace,

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs